An essential aspect of rapid mapping is the timely provision of derived satellite-based crisis information. Up to now, radar satellite data of flood situations has commonly been analyzed by an image interpreter using manual or semi-automatic classification procedures.

Over the last years, DLR/ZKI has further developed the algorithms behind these procedures towards a higher level of automation. The current prototype of a TerraSAR-X based flood service automatically detects inundations without any user-interaction and displays the results via an interactive web client. Using this automatic processing chain, the time span from the delivery of satellite data until the dissemination of first crisis information can be considerably shortened (in the present example, total processing time was far less than 1h).

The image shows the fully-automatic flood detection results for a TerraSAR-X StripMap scene acquired on 21 May, 2014, at the border between Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia.